Riven by the tension between hagiographies, utopias, belief, longing, and grief, the poems of My Heresies catalog a personal and familial history originating in Bucharest, Romania and landing in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether through sardonic takes on old Bible myths or homage paid to French-Romanian poet Paul Celan, Stefanescu's poems are laden in subtext, in imagery sometimes abstract and lush,...

The Mighty Angel concerns the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy. Eighteen times he's woken up in rehab. Eighteen times he's been released?a sober and, more or less, healthy man?after treatment at the hands of the stern therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol. And eighteen times he's stopped off at the liquor store on the way home, to pick up the supplies that are necessary to help him...

Ostap Bender, the ‘grand strategist,’ is a con man on the make in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. He's obsessed with getting one last big score?a few hundred thousand will do, and heading for Rio de Janeiro, where there are ‘a million and a half people, all of them wearing white pants, without exception.’ When Bender hears the story of Alexandr Koreiko, an...

After more than sixty years, The Tin Drum has, if anything, gained in power and relevance. All of Grass’s amazing evocations are still there, and still amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; his grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his presumptive fathers; Oskar’s midget friends—Bebra, the great circus master and Roswitha Raguna, the...

Married unhappily to a prominent member of her tight-knit Russian immigrant community, vivacious Anna K. engages in a reckless affair with an outsider on whom she has pinned fleeting hopes for freedom, while in a neighboring community, Bukharian-Jewish pharmacist Lev harbors a consuming love for Anna's cousin.

In twelve ‘pristine, entrancing’ (Booklist) linked stories, Ellen Litman introduces an unforgettable cast of Russian-Jewish immigrants trying to assimilate in a new world. Tender and wryly funny, these stories trace Masha's and her fellow immigrants' struggles to find a place in a new society—lonely seniors, families grappling with unemployment and depression, and young adults searching for love.

Three generations of women battle against the tides of history, from segregated 1950s America to the fall of the USSR and the rise of revolutionary Rojava.

Tanya Kagan, a rising specialist in Russian art, is trying to entice Russia’s wealthy oligarchs to bid on the biggest sale of her career, The Order of Saint Catherine, while making sense of the sudden, unexplained departure of her husband. Suspenseful and beautifully written, The Imperial Wife asks whether we view female ambition any differently today than we did in the past.

Julia Kolchinsky’s Parallax offers a lyrical narrative of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the poet’s birthplace. As her child expresses a fascination with death and violence, Kolchinsky struggles to process the war unfolding far away, on the same soil where so many of her ancestors perished during the Holocaust.

Active Russian Grammar is a comprehensive modern guide to Russian you’ll actually use, created by the authors of the bestseller Poekhali/Let's Go series that turns grammar drills into enjoyable activities. It breaks grammar into clear, bite-size units with clear explanations, real-life examples, reference tables, and engaging practice designed for real-world use, so you can find what you need...

In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The intricate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to passages from...

During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died—a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks, why does the subject occupy so little space in Germany’s...